


so much is overrated; this, too

by bettercrazythanboring



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Character Study, Crisis of Faith, Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-19
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2018-01-16 02:16:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1328188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bettercrazythanboring/pseuds/bettercrazythanboring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>dying is an art, like everything else. i do it exceptionally well. i do it so it feels like hell.</p>
<p>i do it so it feels real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	so much is overrated; this, too

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for one of the MG ficathons and decided I liked it enough on its own that I'd rework it a bit and post it separately. (And then I rewrote the whole thing and added lots more to it.) Originally prompted by brella.

As long as she could remember, Jade had always considered her first  _real_  memory to be burying her pet butterfly. (Not the vague imprints of bittersweet shivers running through her bony arms, and the lingering sensation of the sun's warmth on the nape of her neck. Memories are solid and focused; they feature recognizable places and people doing things. Surges of unexplained sorrow are  _not_  memories.)

Spot, she'd called him.

The little guy was fluttering around the yard one day, going about its business without a care in the world. After gaping open-mouthed at the tiny, ornate wings for what felt like forever, the little girl put a jar on it because Mommy was being annoying and insisted that she had to eat three times a day or something equally ridiculous. Even then, she could sense how fleeting moments of happiness were—how often Jimmy would take a girl she'd never seen before to the pond on the far end of their fields, right where the woodland started, to where she wasn't allowed to step near when he had a visitor; how rarely Mommy would smile when nobody was looking; how the rain that nurtured their crops and turned the ground into warmth and muddy puddles for her to make a mess with could also give half her kindergarten class pneumonia and ruin the barn's roof. She knew, and so she put a jar on beautiful Spot so that he wouldn't fly away from her.

The girl had fancied herself quite clever for the trap, and knew for sure that she'd done a marvelous thing that night, when she sneaked out at midnight with a flashlight and let Spot out among the stars—and chased him all the way to the front porch light with that same jar when her eyes grew weary and playtime was over. What a great idea she'd had.

But it didn't matter that she was a genius, didn't matter that she'd come up with it all on her own, without having to ask Jimmy for help; when she came looking for the jar the next time—just two days later when the picture books were boring her—Spot lay dead among the verdant blades of grass she'd thought would be his home.

Why, she never knew; no one told her.

She wondered when she was older, in idle moments when her notebooks were filled with so many doodles that she could hardly make out her own notes among the black clouds and hearts, when fantasizing about the back of Joshua's head seemed about as unappealing as coating her face in a layer of make-up and pretending to be Barbie for a night. She wondered if Spot had suffocated, if it had starved, if their old cat had knocked the jar over and crushed its wings, if the noon sunlight had fried it, amplified somehow by the glass. If it had caught on fire, perhaps.

It was never important enough to ask anyone who would actually  _know_ , and so she kept wondering.

The funeral itself had been wonderful, though. A warm, sunny day with spring in the air, beautiful words from Mommy, a grave the little girl dug out with her own fingers whose nails were no strangers to remnants of dirt. The colorful, magnificent creature laid to rest peacefully from whence it came. Pretty even in its death, Spot was.

And she went on convinced that death wasn't a big deal. A little bit sad, sure, but tidy and sharp, and rigidly defined. Beautiful somehow. Her seat at Sunday morning mass was never unoccupied long enough to grow cold, and the life beyond had to be more amazing than words could describe, so it was something to be celebrated, right? No downside.

Even when Mom weeped in front of Aunt Iris' open casket for almost an hour, she couldn't understand why. All of this—Iris and the casket, and the flowers, and where the woman was going, and the serenity on her face—all of it was beautiful.  _Wonderful_.

* * *

 

It's funny, she thinks. There's a lifeless mass of flesh in her arms now, blood instead of dirt under her fingernails, and glass shards digging painfully into her knees, and all that's running through her head is how awkwardly Spot's wing was bent. She clutches Mom's wet, bloody head to her chest and croons in the rhythm of her collapsing lungs, and the look in her vacant eyes sends tears to Jade's own, and all she can think about is that her entire life has been a lie.

Spot's color's had faded so much by the time she buried him. Aunt Iris' smile belonged on a creepy porcelain doll, not a human being—alive or not. The thing she'd stumbled upon in the dead of night while camping a few years ago wasn't the dirty piece of some old coat; it'd been a squirrel. A mangled, cold, sticky creature that had probably been ravaging nuts and disturbing woodpeckers just a few days earlier.

Bile bites her throat and she nearly passes out from the shock—or the pain, maybe—but she grabs onto her mind and holds it awake with sheer willpower, because she has to get this out. She has to be here when Mom wakes up. Has to have the strength to yell at the woman for scaring her like this. Has to be able to strike whatever deal she can with whomever can fix it.

_This_ … this horror, this nightmare that's beginning to resemble death even in the least reasonable parts of her conscious—it's not supposed to be devastating or ugly, not supposed to cause this scorching tightness in her chest, and it's  _certainly_  not supposed to happen to someone she can't imagine her life without. Jade cries out as a last resort, yelling to the empty sky that mocks her with its tranquility and its stupid sunlight that aggravates her eyes to the point of near blindness, and a bright light flashes behind her closed lids, leaving a taste of her despair in the air.

Later, much later, she sits numb in the hospital room with bandages covering most of her body, unable to take her unfocused eyes off the wooden cross on the wall, and can't fathom how she could have ever thought that death had an ounce of beauty in it.

Even later—on nights when her covers lie tousled on the bed and her eyes won't stay shut for two seconds, and Dad wanders outside to chop some wood because he's restless too and has nothing better to do—it angers her. That it's not beautiful. It  _should_  be. It should be great and a cause for celebration and it should be fucking  _peaceful_. Who decided that it was to be this messy, agonizing, lifeless thing? Who looked at the universe and thought "well, this doesn't have  _nearly_  enough suffering in it", and got away with adding  _this_?

Why not a graceful ascension to the next plane, complete with goodbyes and best wishes, and closure? After all the shit and emotional torture that life is  _made_  of, don't humans deserve at least  _that?!_

The last whimper Mom ever made, the one she could only hear hazily from afar because she'd been too late to her own mother's death, echoes in her ears for weeks, stuck right between her temples like a favorite song. Except she doesn't love it; if she could bleach her brain to get it out, she would.

She never thought the meaning of "agony" could be captured in audio waves. Oh, how wrong she'd been.

(It even replays in her dreams. Here, she doesn't have the luxury of blasting an MCR song loud enough to beat the shit out of everything residing in her mind. Here, she has to listen. Here, she can't wake up until she'll die if she doesn't, and does so with a scream that curdles not only Jimmy's blood, but her own, too.)

Some nights, she wipes the tears off her chin and runs barefoot out into the dirt, and screams.

Screams to drown that whimper out. Screams as if she were a dragon and her breath were fire, and she would char from the inside out if she imprisoned it. Screams in languages she didn't even know existed, languages she wouldn't be able to identify if her life depended on it, with words that have more meaning than she can comprehend. She doesn't attempt to understand it (because it helps and things help less when you find out why they do), but she knows as her tongue twists in hard consonants and empty gurgles rushing from the back of her throat, as she makes sounds she's never heard any human make before, she  _knows_  that it's not meaningless gibberish she's made up because her own language failed her.

Jade screams and curses at the sky, and, when she consciously calls God a perverted algophile in her thoughts—the words coming out of her mouth aren't as clear—that's when she knows she's done with Him. That she can't go on believing, trusting,  _loving_  Him if he can allow this. If He couldn't even grant Mom the mercy of death before the pain overtook her. If He couldn't make her listen when the girl asked her to put the seatbelt on.

No one could expect this of her. No one has the right to demand it. To go on, a believer.

* * *

 

How long has she been saving up for a new bike? Three months' allowance? Seven? She hitchhikes a ride to the nearest city—bustling with masses who have things to do, places to go, and people to love—and spends it all at once on every book that deals with conflicted vampires and Victorian ghosts. No werewolves or zombies; just the pretty kind of undead. Still, the bag ends up seeming to weigh more than Jimmy's favorite cow and she can't lift her arms for a week after she's walked home carrying it.

Her fingers paint her eyes with the curves of black she once so detested; they weave alongside each other in the small brightness of her night lamp on chilly autumn nights to create intricate garments adorned with lace… and bucketfuls of black. Each time she crosses a road without looking both ways or says a wrong word to the guy at school everybody says isn't quite right in the head, she  _dares_  the universe to make her death ugly.

Beautiful or not at all, she thinks to herself when a senior taps the back of his motorcycle with a charming grin and she sits on it without a second thought. She won't have it any other way. God owes her this much, doesn't he? If she's not gonna see it coming, if she's not gonna  _deserve it_  in any way—because apparently that's a possibility now, and not just something that happens to far-off fake-believers who are probably lying anyway—then the least she can do is stop being cautious and timid, and be ready— _pretty_ —when it comes instead.

Each time she tempts fate, she commands the sky to show her its balls in the farthest corner of her mind, and, each time, she calls its bluff without a single scratch on her.

So flawless is her skin that, after a while—when playing chicken with someone who's not even on the road starts to feel a bit too much like banging her head against a wall—she begins to mar it  _herself_. It's not right. Mom's lying rotten in a casket that will outlast her by decades, but  _she_  hasn't even stubbed her toe since getting that concussion. Something's just…  _off_  about that. Jade sneaks into the bathroom and digs for the collection of razors Dad bought in bulk on sale three years ago and never got around to reselling, and she expected to feel defiant or even just relieved at finding them, but, as the blade digs into her skin and thick red drips down on the wet, white porcelain that nobody's scrubbed since the accident, her only emotion is apathy.

_Somebody's_  gotta leave a mark on her; if the universe can't be bothered to send anyone else to do the job...

Jimmy peeks into her room sometimes without her knowing. (Duh, because, if she had, she'd slam the door in his face and make sure to catch his nose on the way.) The black curtains and the skull-shaped candles and the dark notebooks leave him unsettled, but they're in the realm of things he expected. Not the paper he stumbles upon one day; she's drawn on it with what looks to be blood. Her own, if the few faded stains on her bathroom floor are any indication. A chill runs through him and that's when she flings the door open and starts screaming at him for being in her room, and hurls the nearest book in his direction for good measure. He can't finish being shocked and ends up debating whether to tell Dad or write it off as a one-time experiment gone awry. Debates it all the way to the next time his little sister's out of the house, at which point five more drawings—detailed, brown,  _terrifying_ —greet him, and two minutes later he's shoving them into Dad's hands.

Nothing either of them can say gets through to her even a little bit, not the first time, not the second, not the tenth—sometimes it feels like they forget what they were about to say the moment the conversation begins—and, eventually, Jimmy stops searching for those papers. Never aware that, eventually, they all disappear anyway.

She lights them up one starry night when she's  _done_  with inflicting scars on herself, these things that aren't all that beautiful, as it turns out, nor give her any satisfaction anymore. The echo of the lighter's click reverberates through her bones as she lets those drawings paint the air in shades of yellow and red before dropping them, one by one, onto the crop field below. They multiply and spread, and it's a sight to see—how the calm green and pale sandy of the crops light up in saturated tints of orange as far as the eye can see. It's like she's taken her boldest crayon to the world-shaped coloring book, and fills the entire page because coloring within the lines is for wimps whose mothers cut the crust off their sandwiches.

Jade lets go of the last piece of paper and kneels down in front of a particular patch of barley, watching with wonder as the fire eats up the grains. Slowly. Urgently. Magnificently.

Ravaging. Sparking.

It behaves just like her smile, she thinks. It's  _beautiful._

* * *

 

The time comes for her to die—again and again, and  _again_. It's not a "maybe", this time; not a tempt of fate. It's real and tangible, and she refuses to let anyone but herself win. Her hair floats around her face the first time, skirt billowing in the forceful streams of water, and there's some poetic closure in that, after all the fire's she's set. There's a small glimmer of satisfaction, before the aquarium disappears and she vomits water onto the floor, and her clothes cling to her skin like leeches, and she passes out almost instantly, only to wake up to the tune of school faculty planning to murder her. (It's different when she's the one doing the planning. She has the right; they don't. She doesn't  _want_  to die, and they certainly shouldn't  _help_  her.)

Days later, the noose leaves prints in her skin and her classmates watch with faces halfway between uncomfortable and excited, and, for a few blissful moments, she can imagine herself as the tortured heroine of an old, romanticized novel. The scandal she must have caused for a public hanging, oh my. But then she chokes and suffocates, and starts to convulse and grasp at empty air, feet scrambling back for the teacher's desk, and her spine settles wrong, and she tries to make herself pass out just so that the pain would disappear. After coming back to life, she can't swallow or feel her fingertips for days, not even when vomit comes pouring out of her every chance it gets.

The week after, when her legs can carry her weight once more without giving out, she lets her hair stick out however it wants, wipes the eyeliner off, and lifts a middle finger to the sky. She can't croak any spoken words out yet—it feels like the walls of her throat will spill out her mouth if she does—but that should get the message across, right?

She's gonna die just as she is, pretenses be damned, you hear her? And it ain't gonna count,  _not even once_ , until she's good and ready.

See, the day she dies for the third time, she finally learns that the beauty of death exists. Except it lies not in a carcass left behind, but in a life lived and fulfilled. And if those are the rules she set for herself one thoughtless afternoon a lifetime ago—aesthetics exchanged for her soul—then so be it. It goes both ways; the universe can't take her,  _God_  can't take her, if she lets the murder and gore rear their disgusting, ugly heads. Vile and repulsive, and every other antonym for "beautiful" there ever was.

Those are the rules, she repeats to herself when Ike cuts her open, her innards spilling out in a way that would make her vomit if her stomach weren't among them. Those are the rules and Jade always did love finding ways to bend them to her advantage, ever since she got Caitlyn Reynolds banned from watching soccer practice because her phone rang once and distracted the goalie.

The beauty, you see, lies in the choice. She's just gotta ask herself: is she departing from this world, from this  _life_  for good today?

No, she's  _fucking_  not.


End file.
